When I started the Flock Sheepspot's online community for inquisitive hand spinners in 2020, I had everyone who joined answer a question. Who taught you to spin? And I was really surprised to learn that at least 60 percent, but the number may be way higher than that, of the respondents said that they were self-taught. lot. And it really surprised me that the number was that high. Now, obviously, there are a lot of advantages to teaching yourself to spin. You can go at your own pace.
You can kind of follow your own interests. You don't have to travel or even put your wheel in the car. And the price is right, or it seems that way. I'm going to come back to that in a little bit. But there are also really big disadvantages to going it alone. And in today's episode, I'm going to share 10 of those disadvantages. Hello there, darling Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 122 of the Sheepspot Podcast.
I'm Sasha, and my job, and it is the best job in the world, is to to help you make more yarns you love. I've got 10 things to talk about today, all of which, by the way, come straight from conversations I've had with students. So let's just dive right in. All right. Disadvantage number one, bad information. There is a lot of spinning information on the internet. A lot of it is helpful and accurate, but a lot of it isn't.
And as a relatively new spinner, it can be really hard to kind of sort the wheat from the chaff. And I find that unmoderated online forums are frequent culprits in sharing bad information. And here's a little example. So while I was prepping to do this podcast, I thought I would just do a random internet search and see what happened. And so I searched, I think the term that I keyed in was over-twisted yarns. And I landed on a couple of Reddit forums.
And one that wasn't Reddit, it was someplace else. Anyway, and there was somebody wrote in and asked, my yarns have way too much twist, so what do I do? And there were a variety of responses like, let go of the end of your yarn and let the twist run out of it. That was that was mentioned frequently. Try to treadle more slowly, that was mentioned frequently. But no one said change your drive ratio, which is a way better answer to that question in my view.
Because you can't, it's just not always practical or possible to let your yarn go and let the twist run out at the end of it. And if you're doing that every five minutes, something's going wrong. And the thing that's going wrong is you're on the wrong drive ratio. So it was fascinating to me, this little exercise. So problem number one with going it alone, bad information.
Number two, bad sequencing. So even great information can be unhelpful if it comes to you before you're ready for it or after you needed it. As I discussed in episode 121, the sequence in which information is presented to you as you're learning something really, really matters. And instruction that pays attention to that sequence makes learning anything easier to do and more fun because early lessons are reinforced by everything that follows.
I also think people learn better this way because they're constantly sort of reinforcing the stuff that they learn first with everything that comes after. Number three, bad habits. When you're on your own, it's very easy to establish unhelpful habits and get them so firmly set into your muscle memory that they are very hard to unlearn.
If you're in the habit of treadling faster than your hands can keep up with, for example, Once you've been doing it for a while, it is very challenging to slow down. And so you can save yourself an enormous amount of time and energy by establishing good habits from the start. Number four, getting discouraged. When things go wrong or you get stuck, it's easy to get really down on yourself and really discouraged because you don't have any support. port.
And I have this, sometimes this idea haunts me. I know I'm weird, but it does haunt me. I have a secret fear that the world is full of spinning wheels that are gathering dust in basements and attics because the spinner they belong to just got discouraged, didn't know how to get help and gave up. And I believe that wheels want to be used. I'm a little superstitious that that way. But the other reason this haunts me is that spinning is so much fun.
And I hate the thought of spinners quitting before they get to how fun it is. Number five, getting overwhelmed, flitting from source to source, looking for information. So let's say that you're trying to solve a specific issue with your wheel or your yarn, and you're ready to ask the almighty Google for help. If you are a new spinner and you don't have any more experienced spinners to ask, it can be difficult even to formulate the search.
And if you can get past that hurdle, you may be offered pages and pages of conflicting advice. And again, it's very hard to sort through that as a beginner. Next, this is a big one. Not having access to those little tips and tricks and tweaks that can get you unstuck and keep you moving forward. This is a really, for me, this is huge. There are so many small tweaks that you can make when spinning that will transform your yarn and your experience at the wheel really, really quickly.
And this can be anything to how to tie a leader onto your bobbin that won't slip, to making a habit of checking your staple length to establish how far you should draft in a short forward draft. There are so many little bits of information like this in spinning. And if you've got access to them, you're going to make progress so much faster. Next up, another pitfall of going it alone, disappointing results.
They say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. If you're not thrilled by your yarn and lots of new spinners aren't, it can be really hard to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it on your own.
And the next one is kind of related to disappointing results it's making essentially the same yarn over and over again usually because you don't know that there are different things you could be doing that would change your results and if this is true I have a resource in the flock for you it's a free resource and it's a challenge called one fiber five ways and it's It's essentially you take one braid of fiber and you spin it five different ways.
And it's basically a little course, a little mini course in drafting. So if you feel like you're spinning the same yarn over and over again and you don't know how to get to different yarns, check that out, that challenge out, because I think it'll help a lot. Next up, this is another big one. And I have to thank Liz Gibson for this formulation. And that is another disadvantage of teaching yourself to spin is not knowing what not to worry about.
And I was taking an online course with Liz Gibson, who teaches rigid heddle weaving. And she pointed out, and this made such a deep impression on me, she pointed out that when you're new at something, you don't know what's important to pay attention to and what not to bother with. And so you try to pay attention to everything and try to get everything perfect. effect. And Liz says that one of her jobs as a teacher is to tell students what not to worry about.
And I've really taken this to heart. And that's why one of the things we do in spin school in module four is to get students working with their hand spun right away before they really think their yarn is quote quote good enough. Students are amazed at how good their lumpy bumpy early yarn looks in their projects. They've been sweating over every single little inconsistency as they spin and a lot of those inconsistencies aren't even going to show in their final project.
Another example I think it's worth getting I do think it's worth getting good at making joins and you're spinning, like that's an important skill and you should learn how to do it. But students can get super hung up on getting them perfect. And the fact is that bad joins usually just are going to disappear into the fabric. And the really wonky ones, provided you're spinning with wool, they can usually be fixed with a very quick, simple spit splice.
So, don't sweat the joins. I mean, learn how to make joins, but they're not all going to be perfect, and it's going to be fine. They're not going to show that much. And finally, and this might be the most important one of all, and that is that your time is valuable. So to those of you who are going it alone and teaching yourself to spin, I want you to consider valuing your time as much as you value your money. Because free usually isn't really free.
Often what we don't spend money on requires huge investments of time.
And one thing I know for sure based on my own experience learning to spin and the experience of many of my students is that a good spinning teacher can get you to making yarn you love and feel really proud of way more quickly and more easily than you'll get there on your own by sharing good information in the right order, preventing you from acquiring bad habits that you're then going to need to undo, supporting you when you're stuck or discouraged,
sharing those important tips and tricks, and telling you what to pay attention to and what really isn't going to matter in the long run. So whether you work with me, take classes at festivals, watch videos on long thread media or craftsy, you don't have to go it alone. There's lots of help available. If you're ready to get some help and you'd like to work with me, you can find out all about Spin School, my course on the fundamentals of spinning at cheapspot.com slash spin hyphen school.
There is a dedicated discussion thread in the Flock where you can comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners. The link is in the show notes for this episode, and you'll find the show notes right inside your podcast app. So to join the conversation, just open up the description for this episode, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the thread. If you haven't joined The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners, you really should.
You'll get access to all the freebies that I've created for the podcast, as well as several self-guided spinning challenges, our weekly spinning check-ins every Friday, and lots more.
Join us at theflock.sheepspot.com. so darling sheep spotter that is it for me this week thank you so much for listening i will be back next week with a dispatch or actually really a series of dispatches from my uh retreat that i am going to be starting in a few hours um here in nova scotia so you don't want to miss that. Until then, go ahead and spin something. And if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. You might have some time to get in some spinning outdoors before it gets too cold.
I promise that you will not regret it.